Another thing: Outside in

Pick a side.

Welcome to Letters From the Knot. This is a free weekly newsletter, primarily built as an outlet for a fiction writing project I’m working on. On the weeks I’m not publishing fiction, though, I’ll be sending something a bit more freeform and personal. This is one of those.

I’m in a WhatsApp group that seems particularly prone to fractious and often binary debates. Recent highlights include “was punk ever political, or just nihilistic?” and  “would you sleep with Rishi Sunak?” and “would you rather be rejected on Naked Attraction for your face or your genitalia?” 

An especially damaging rift persists over the saying “people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”. Half of the group thinks that, in this imagined scenario, the person throwing the stones is inside their own glass house. In their twisted vision, the reason this person shouldn’t throw stones is because they might damage their precious glass home from within. 

The other (correct) half of the group understand that the hero of this cautionary tale is outside, throwing stones at other people’s houses. The point (obviously) is that they shouldn’t be throwing stones because of the risk that someone will damage their glass house in retaliation, that the glass house in this proverb represents what a person stands to lose. 

Somehow this issue remains unsettled (thoughts welcome) but I was reminded of it during a more recent discussion: do you prefer going out or staying in? 

Once again the group was divided. For some, going out (whether that b socialising, drinking, going to the theatre) was just a means to the end of coming home again, and indulging in home’s soft and quiet pleasures. For others (or perhaps it was just me), staying in was something akin to killing time, idling, waiting for the next opportunity to get back out into the world. 

This has long been the case for me. Given the choice, I’d always choose to go out rather than stay in, especially in the evenings. I lived alone for a few months once and struggled with this pressure daily. I found that I was completely comfortable in my own company during the day and could fill hours with ease but, when the sun went down, I had this sudden sense of the world closing in and I would start to feel claustrophobic, rebelling against the idea that all I had left of my day was sitting silently watching TV or reading until bedtime. I hated the idea that the last interaction of the day was behind me. 

On those evenings, I would often just take myself out for a walk around the streets of Manchester at 11 at night, just for the misguided sense that I was somehow more connected to the world. Or, if I got a message from a friend or colleague asking if I was about, I’d leave the house immediately, smug that I had snatched a night out from the closing jaws of a night in. 

And sure, you’re probably there thinking this speaks of a troubled mind, of a person who’s running away from something. Probably! Yes! I don’t really know where this drive comes from. Deeply ingrained fomo? Hate my own company? Could be. When I was a child, I used to sleep with my bedroom door open. When it was closed, I would get this feeling that my room was going to drift away from the house, literally float off into space if I was shut off from the rest of the house for too long. It’s possible my desire to stay connected to the world has something to do with that but who knows (psychoanalysts hmu). 

The fact is that this restlessness has followed me into my advancing adulthood. On some level, I think, staying in has always represented stillness and replicability. Yes staying in can be nice, but it will still be nice tomorrow, or the day after. It’s only when you’re out that you give yourself over to the flows of the rest of the world, only outside is there the chaos and the magic of unanticipated life. 

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Like so many things in my life, my instinctive desire to go out is something I’ve had to question and reassess over the past few years. I’ve written in this newsletter before about my partner's chronic illness, and the ways in which her periods of relapse shrink her world and mine. In that last post, I was writing about the way in which time collapses in on itself and, as an act of self-preservation, you learn only to think about the next few hours or days.

She’s now entered another phase of relapse which, really, is just an extension of the last one, because it's never simple to distinguish between periods of good or bad health when a person is chronically ill. For the past few weeks, though, it’s been worse again, and I’ve been thinking more about that feeling of contraction. It occurs to me that while your sense of time contracts, so does your sense of space. 

Her illness makes it difficult to walk far, or even to get public transport. Being in a busy pub or restaurant is a challenge, and sitting in certain positions can be unsustainable; every planned trip out is fraught with compromises and gambles. The result is that our world shrinks spatially too, and our life is lived in diminishing circles around our flat and, for the most part, within its walls. In this sense, we’re lucky; we have a flat, and it’s nice. Even so, it’s hard for her to see the world tumbling on around us - plans still being made, friends going on holiday, raucous evenings in the pub - and to know she can’t take part in it.   

Like me, she’s a going out person for the most part. Unlike me, she’s always appreciated the balance of the two, and in times of good health, she flits between them with ease, as comfortable getting pissed at the karaoke as she is watching Eastenders in a dressing gown of an evening. It’s a cruelty that this balance is denied her, and it exposes how shallow and ignorant my old views about staying in were. I used to associate being at home with inaction, and repetition, of “being good” for an evening before taking the first opportunity to get out again. There’s something callous about this stance, I now understand, when you consider those who don’t have a choice. 

But I’m learning, principally that whether you’re in or out is irrelevant when you’ve got the right people around you. I’ve been helped in my education by a community of neighbours and friends and family members who have come to support her, and to support us. In earlier relapses, we’ve both felt a little isolated, unwilling or unable to ask for people to come to us and be with us when going out wasn’t an option. Increasingly, though, we’re feeling better able to ask that of our friends, or we’re meeting new friends who wouldn’t think twice about it because they know these cycles are just a part of our lives. 

Over the past months, so many of our nights have been spent with people. Perhaps as many nights as we would normally have gone out are now spent hosting friends, or visiting neighbours or, even better, having friends insist on coming over to cook for us. It’s a life of home cooked food, and board games, and (often shit) films, and early nights. It’s a life my restless younger self may not have seen in his future. It’s a life full of love, of loving people, of richness. 

Not all that long ago, something in my soul would tell me that, to find that richness of life, you’d need to get out into the world and lose yourself in its flows. Recently, I’ve come to understand that all you need to do is invite that chaos and magic inside with you.

Cultural indigestion

Some bits of things I’ve been doing.

Reading: I’m continuing to work through old copies of Granta, and I’ve been really enjoying the Sister, Brother issue (161) that came out last year, which examines sibling relationships in a number of provocative ways. I especially liked a piece called Plastic Mothers by Lauren John Jospeh, a piece of memoir that explodes preconceptions about established family formations, and uses this as a framework for a broader acceptance of evolving identities.

Watching: Absolutely loved watching Jury Duty, the sort of half-mockumentary, half- prank show that places a real person at the centre of a fake trial. One of the only genuinely moving comedic shows I’ve seen in such a long time. Highly recommend.

Listening: I’ve become quietly obsessed with BADBADNOTGOOD over the past few weeks. Would highly recommend this track they did with Denzel Curry if you’ve not heard them before.